Sunday, December 10, 2017

Latest 'bombshell' Fake News from CNN, MSNBC, CBS News and others aggressively hyped a spectacularly false story they honestly believed was "proof" that could remove Trump. CBS News even said it had independently "confirmed" CNN's story--Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

"Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time.
The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close
behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the
party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear
that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets
had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of
people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

This entire revelation was based on an email
which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its
possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” –
someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify –
to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC
emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in
CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten
days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails
online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered
special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the
Kremlin.

There was just one small problem with this story: it was
fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after
CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the
Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false
story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as
false, the journalist who originally presented it, Congressional
reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s PR Department then claimed
that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju
went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming
that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email,
while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but
only had sources describe its purported contents:

All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and
critical question – one which CNN refuses to address:how did “multiple
sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same
way, and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to
CNN?

It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might
innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely
plausible that multiple sourcescould all innocently and in
good faith misread the date in exactly the same way,all to cause to be
disseminated a blockbuster revelation about Trump/Russia/WikiLeaks
collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to
answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal
transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.

Why does this matter so much?For so many significant reasons:

To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how
fast, far and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits,
operatives andjournalists with huge social media platformspredictably
jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion
between Trump and Russia(through WikiLeaks). One tweet fromDemocratic
Congressman Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal
collusion, was re-tweeted thousands and thousands of timesin just a few
hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and
long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that
the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).

Brookings’ [Senior Fellow] Benjamin Wittes, whose star has risen as he has promoted
himself as a friend of former FBI Director Jim Comey, not only promoted
the CNN story in the morning, but did so with the word “Boom”– which he
uses to signal that a major blow has been delivered to Trump on the
Russia story – along with a gif of a cannon being detonated:

Incredibly, to this very moment – almost 24 hours after CNN’s story
was debunked – Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers
that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false,
even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so
significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article
discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly
250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added
noting that the whole thing was false.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived – filled
with false news and propaganda – by the CNN story. But thanks to
Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every
Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s
certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost
certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic
accuracy – which would presumably include all the people who have spent
the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like
– would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended
up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone
should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened
here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere
near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people
with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN
this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They
were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as
many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS
News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the
email, and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

Think about what this means. It means that at least two – and possibly
more – sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in
terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false
information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple
reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic
members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff
members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s
emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We
won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial
information to the public: which “multiple sources” acted jointly to
disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s
largest news outlets?

Just last week, the Washington Post decided – to great applause (including mine) – to expose a source
to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections
because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false
information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the
Post. It’s a well established principle of journalism – one that is
rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in DC – that
journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who
purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.

Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not
just CNN but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so
deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an
accounting of what happened – what one might call “minimal journalistic
transparency” – it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s
very difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple sources all fed the
wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and
highly inflammatory storyto be reported, then these media outlets have
an obligation to expose who the culprits are – just as the Washington
Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it
was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a
nobody-in-DC, rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream
of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the
Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent
mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible
sequence of events could possibly have happened.

Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what
journalists ought to do: rather than informing the public about what
happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for
themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they
are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by PR
executives and lawyers.

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept
certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s
particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly
complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between
Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained
DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they
sometimes go in one direction, and other times go in the other
direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually
every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as
inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump/Russia story and
about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start
going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they
cease looking like mistakes.

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how
much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to
our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this,
that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the
last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones
from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times yesterday in its news reporton CNN’s embarrassment:

It was also yet another
prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are
confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in
attacking the media as “fake news.”

Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter,
Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed
Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact
Russian officials during the presidential race.

The
report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and
a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr.
Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.

Several
news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also
inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a
subpoena from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for President
Trump’s financial records.

The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.

That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times
major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the
Trump/Russia story, always in the same direction, toward the same
political goals. Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims
that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected,
walk-backed, or retracted – often long after the initial false claims
spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the
attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:

Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (WashPost)

An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (WashPost)

Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and
misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most
devoted critics – such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow
– are constantly warning that the U.S. media’s unhinged, ignorant,
paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of
ways, in the process destroying the credibility of the U.S. media in the
eyes of Putin’s opposition (who — unlike Americans who have been fed a
steady news and entertainment propaganda dietfor decades about Russia—
actually understand the realities of that country).

But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand
respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t
be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false
stories are published to plaudits, traffic and other rewards, only to
fall apart upon minimal scrutiny. It certainly means that all of these
“errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction,pushing the same
political outcome or journalistic conclusion.

But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are
responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we
witnessed yesterday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering
transparency and accountability. In this case, that can’t mean hiding
behind PR and lawyer silence and waiting for this to just all blow away.

At minimum, these networks – CNN, MSNBC and CBS – have to either
identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information, or
explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same
information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their
cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should
fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks – the reason
those attacks resonate – is themselves and their own conduct."